While the question is implied in my previous post, I’d like to spell it out directly here in the hope that someone can provide an answer.

Why is it a criminal offence to possess cannabis?

The recent admission by the British Home Secretary that their policy is not based upon scientific advice is merely an unusually candid statement of a well-understood truth.

Stephen Whitehead, in the comments to my last post, suggests that the policy might be a product of “values and social norms”. But which values, specifically? And how does one pin down “social norms” long enough to legislate and incarcerate based upon them?

I’d argue that the values of a liberal society are actively transgressed by a government that chooses to destroy the lives of those who engage in a private activity that harms nobody except in extremely rare cases, themselves. Intoxication is not itself a transgression of any western values. And social norms are a dreadful basis for legislation. Those who speak of the wisdom of crowds have never studied group psychodynamics. Groups of people can be manipulated into accepting almost any set of social norms one cares to mention. For good or for ill.

So if a government acknowledges that drug prohibition is not based upon the harm caused by drugs (and indeed seems to exacerbate that harm), then what is it based upon? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. Up until now I assumed it had something to do with our laws being made by a generation of people who were ignorant and fearful of drugs and who erroneously assumed drugs were more harmful than prohibition. Now, however, we have law-makers who were adolescents in the 1960s and 70s, many of whom admit to having tried it themselves* and who have received clear advice from experts in the field that prohibition simply doesn’t have a scientific justification.

What worries me is that Stephen Whitehead may well be right. Drug prohibition, like so many other areas of policy, is indeed based upon “values and social norms”. But “values and social norms” is little more than a respectable way of saying “the editorial position of tabloids”. Our law-makers (and this goes for us over here in Ireland as well as my friends in Britain) appear infinitely more concerned with keeping The Daily Mail and The Sun happy than they are with passing rational laws and doing the right thing.

And people still wonder why I (and so many others) have begun to hold the democratic process in such contempt. There’s no way of testing it, of course, but I pretty much guarantee that were the editors of tabloid newspapers and Sky News to shift their position on drug prohibition tomorrow that the entire public debate would have changed within a couple of weeks and we would see major changes in the law within a few months or so. And when a handful of media moguls have the power to substantially alter “values and social norms” it becomes quite clear why “values and social norms” should never trump scientific evidence and rational assessment in the arena of public policy.

Update 15:36: And on roughly the same topic…

The excellent Stewart Lee

* and who would never have been selected as parliamentary candidates if they’d been criminalised as a result. How much more harmful would a five year jail sentence have been to David Cameron than the pot he smoked at Eton? How much more harmful would a criminal record be to Jack Straw’s son, than the little bit of weed he sold? But so long as the harm isn’t happening to them, our political classes appear blind to it. Petty, vindictive, hypocritical bastards that they are.

6 responses to "Cannabis prohibition — a question"

Nice one, Jim. I have Twitter’d link to this.

Of course (and I’m sure you’re aware) the ultimate answer as to why cannabis is illegal goes back to the Hearst empire & cotton paper-vs-flax monopolies… and the UK just followed the US push as part of the Oh-so-Special Relationship.

Cat, I am indeed familiar with the sorry sordid story of the successful Hearst / Anslinger campaign to outlaw cannabis. In fact, I covered that tale in some depth in Heads and Tales (back in the days before the internet killed ‘zine culture).

Thing is, while that was the original reason for cannabis prohibition, it’s not really relevant any more. I doubt there’s more than one or two current politicians who are even aware of it. And yet, such was the success of their campaign; Hearst and Anslinger have succeeded in indoctrinating our entire culture. Now we have a generation of legislators who neither listen to the scientific evidence on cannabis nor understand the corrupt history of prohibition.

Reefer Madness is still alive and well. Though it’s rife among the prohibitionists, not the tokers.

I thought the desire to criminalise Hispanic immigrants, who were the main consumers of cannabis in the US at the time, was at least as important as the Hearst conspiracy…? But I’m an interested amateur rather than an expert.

Not sure I agree with you on why it’s still banned. D’you really think Murdoch and Dacre have a significant personal interest in keeping cannabis illegal? AFAIK neither group has significant investments in alcohol or tobacco (in any case, any plausible legalisation of cannabis in the real world, rather than a better world, would likely provide the alcohol and tobacco industries with as much of an opportunity as a threat), or non-hemp plantations, or anything else to which cannabis legalisation would be a threat.

Rather, they reflect their reactionary readers’ prejudices. Which probably stem from 1950s reefer madness in the first place, creating a feedback loop from ignorant masses to pandering press to ignorant masses. You’d need a dedicated, long-term PR campaign to change those attitudes – and who’d be in a position to run one of those?

My ears are burning Jim! I don’t have time right now to respond in full to your interesting post. But I thought I’d clarify my own position for anyone who hasn’t read my comments on the last post.

I’m strongly in favour of reform to our current drug laws, but not in favour of abrogating the responsibility of making that decision to any given expert. Evidence on the relative harms of different drugs and of prohibition must play a vital role in informing the political process of designing drug laws, but they are not a substitute for a political process.

And I’d also suggest that without ‘values and social norms’ expressed through a political process (and I should also point out that I’m no more favourably inclined to the political institutions that we have at the moment, than I am to our current drug laws) we don’t have any way to go from scientific evidence to policy decisions. By taking any public policy decison when are considering not only what change it will make to the world (for which evidence is the primary source of information, though it is by no means infallible) but also how desirable that change is. When you argue that not incarcerating people is a good thing, you are appealing to a claim about what is desirable in the world which (while highly reasonable) is rooted in a judgement about the value of liberty which the product of a socal process. By ‘de-politicising’ decision making we hide the values on which we are making decision, not eliminate them.

I should probably also point out that the views expressed here and elsewhere are my own and not those of anyone silly enough to employ me.

I thought the desire to criminalise Hispanic immigrants, who were the main consumers of cannabis in the US at the time, was at least as important as the Hearst conspiracy

Hey John. I think you’re confusing motive with means here. The story of how Hearst and Anslinger (with a little help from a certain Lammot du Pont) kickstarted a global war against pot has more than a few twists and turns. Some years ago I spent a fair amount of time researching it for a ‘zine I ran. I believe the facts are as follows:

Firstly, while there wasn’t only one single reason for the campaign, the financial interests of Hearst and du Pont were the primary motivation behind it. The invention of the “hemp decorticator” machine in the 1920s threatened the timber holdings / paper manufacturing of Hearst and du Pont with complete obsolescence. Popular Mechanics magazine described hemp as being the “billion dollar crop” and suggested that the days of the “costly and inefficient method” of making paper out of wood were at an end. Ironically, by the time the article was published, Anslinger had already succeeded in killing hemp as a commercial crop thanks to the ridiculously draconian marijuana tax he’d forced into law in the mid 30s (but that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves).

Throughout the 1920s, Hearst — with the backing of du Pont who saw hemp and cannabis as direct threats to many of his products — began to publish a series of stories that demonised cannabis use. Legal restrictions on the sale and possession of the drug had begun a couple of years earlier but were confined to a handful of States, and were mostly for the racist reasons you alluded to. Mexican immigrants tended to smoke cannabis and some politicians at the time were worried that the habit might spread to “decent white folk”.

These initial laws were generally ignored and rarely enforced. They were little more than a pretext for the police to smash some Mexican heads whenever they felt like. An interesting aside (and one of du Pont’s big concerns), is that tincture of cannabis was becoming popular among elderly white people as a treatment for arthritis and back problems.

But it was the development of equipment to harvest and process hemp into paper on an industrial scale that confirmed Hearst’s fears and he successfully lobbied his friend and Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, into doing something about it. In 1930 Mellon formed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the FBN is what later evolved into the DEA) and appointed his niece’s husband, Harry Anslinger, to head it up. Anslinger had cut his teeth as a Strike Buster in his 20s and — apparently something of a puritan — had then spent some years travelling the world trying to drum up support for an international ban on narcotics of all kinds. (As another aside, there’s evidence to suggest that Anslinger — like so many people of his ilk — was profoundly hypocritical about all of this and had no problem setting up a clandestine supply of morphine for colleagues).

Anyhow, by about 1932, Anslinger appears to have begun “co-ordinating” Federal Policy with Hearst and du Pont. Their strategy was quite brilliant and owed much to the theories emerging from the newly formalised discipline of public relations (which itself owed a huge debt to Freudian theory). The first thing they did was to change the name of the thing they sought to ban. Adopting the Mexican word for the drug, marijuana, they avoided raising objections from either hemp farmers or the American Medical Association long enough for their campaign to work up a critical mass. For instance, there’s the tale (possibly apocryphal) of a delegate from the American Medical Association arriving in Washington too late to testify at Senate Hearings on Marijuana because they hadn’t realised that cannabis and marijuana were the same thing until the final day of the hearings.

Once they’d changed the name, the demonisation in Hearst’s newspapers and on film began in earnest (the infamous Reefer Madness is but one, albeit the most lurid, of several short films produced as part of this propaganda blitz). Few realised that the Evil Weed that apparently drove black men to rape white women was the same substance their granny used to treat back-ache. Anslinger’s famous “satanic music” quote is only the tip of a very poisonous iceberg…

There are 100,000 marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.

Marijuana made Mexicans lazy and untrustworthy. It made African Americans violent. It made sexual deviants out of young white women and criminals out of white men. We can laugh at the absurdity of the Reefer Madness campaign today, but it’s worth pointing out that while Jews were being portrayed as rats in fascist propoganda in Europe, black and Mexican men were being portrayed as savage beasts on American screens. Hearst, Anslinger and du Pont played upon the racism endemic in much of white America at the time for financial gain.

While all of this was happening, another motive entered the arena. The end of alcohol prohibition threatened to put thousands of law enforcement officials out of work. Anslinger began to transfer these agents into his newly formed FBN. Before long he had a small army of men just waiting for cannabis prohibition to come into effect. And together big business, the media and law enforcement worked tirelessly to ensure just that. Despite 11th hour objections from the American Medical Association and a group of commercial hemp farmers, the Marijuana Tax was introduced. A year later, the sale of cannabis was made illegal and Anslinger continued working until even the possession of small quantities was a punishable offence.

As an ironic epilogue, just as Anslinger got his way and pushed through the laws which would ban the growing and sale of cannabis, the US entered the second world war and found themselves desperately short of raw materials for rope and canvas. A government-made film, “Hemp For Victory”, encouraged farmers to grow the versatile crop under licence to help the war effort. At the end of the war, however, Anslinger personally ensured that all licences were revoked and the mechanism for issuing further licences abolished.

So there you have it. The demonisation of Mexican immigrants was one of the methods by which Hearst, Anslinger and du Pont ensured sympathy for their position within a largely racist political class. It wasn’t, in itself, the reason for their campaign.

Not sure I agree with you on why it’s still banned. D’you really think Murdoch and Dacre have a significant personal interest in keeping cannabis illegal?

Absolutely not. Apologies if I gave that impression. I’m not suggesting that the owners of the mainstream media are even aware of this history (though they may be). And I fully accept your theory that their position on cannabis prohibition has more to do with pandering to their readers’ prejudices than any personal gain.

My point was that the “feedback loop from ignorant masses to pandering press to ignorant masses” that you mention, would be effectively neutralised if the media took a radically different stance on the issue and removed themselves from that loop. I don’t claim that Murdoch and Dacre have anything personal to gain from cannabis prohibition. They are merely continuing down the path of least resistance by reinforcing a prejudice that was originally generated for the personal gain of others. What I am claiming is that if Murdoch and Dacre stood to gain from cannabis legalisation, it wouldn’t take them very long to change government policy on the issue.

I should first point out that my position on policy making has been radically simplified (almost to the point of self-caricature) in the above post. But that’s the nature of blogging.

I’m aware that we’re actually on the same page with regards to drug policy (or appear to be). Where I disagree (to some extent) with you is when you state:

When you argue that not incarcerating people is a good thing, you are appealing to a claim about what is desirable in the world which (while highly reasonable) is rooted in a judgement about the value of liberty which the product of a socal process.

I don’t see my position as making any value judgment about liberty at all. I am instead making what I consider to be an evidence-based claim that incarceration causes harm. I also believe it is true to say that harming individual members of a society causes general harm to society as a whole. Be careful about asking me to substantiate this second claim as it may spark an interminable and impenetrable essay about systems dynamics and that bloody “ecology of mind” I keep banging on about.

Anyhoo, obviously I’m not forwarding an argument for the total abolition of incarceration. There are clear cases where society is harmed more by allowing an individual to remain free than it is through their incarceration. However, in the case of drug use (specifically, though not limited to cannabis use) there is overwhelming evidence that this is not the case; i.e. that the amount of damage caused by criminalisation and imprisonment is greater than that done by the possession and consumption of the drug.

I’m probably guilty of hyperbole when I completely dismiss “values and social norms” as factors in policy making. But I hope the point I’m trying to make with that hyperbole is clear? “Values and social norms” are flexible and easily manipulated by those with the means to do so. And because “those with the means” refers to a tiny proportion of the population whose actions tend to be dictated by short term self-interest, I am extremely sceptical about placing too much faith on those values. We can point to a thousand examples where our values and norms are compatible with rational policy, but that does not legitimise all of our values and norms, nor guarantee that some of the policies we base upon them are not fantastically harmful.

As alluded to earlier, I’m currently studying the psychodynamics of sustainability and have come to the conclusion that many of the values and social norms of modern industrial society are quite literally suicidal in the medium term. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

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